MacOS 27 Golden Gate: Top New Features

During the keynote presentation at Monday's WWDC, Apple previewed the next version of macOS. The official name of the Mac’s operating system is macOS 27 Golden Gate, keeping the California naming scheme around.

This year's update is focused on the relaunched Siri (now known as Siri AI), which really strives to transform into a proper AI chatbot along the lines of ChatGPT or Google Gemini—with a unique Apple twist.

Last year, Apple announced that macOS 26 Tahoe would be the last update to support Intel-powered Macs. The new update, macOS 27 Golden Gate, is only compatible with Apple Silicon Macs. Here's the full list of supported devices:

Some of the more advanced Apple Intelligence features, such as the improved Voice Mode, are exclusive to newer Macs. Those more advanced modes require an M3 Mac or newer with at least 12 GB of RAM. That rules out the MacBook Neo and lots of MacBook Airs from before 2024.

One more caveat: Siri AI will not be immediately available in the EU or China due to regulatory concerns.

MacOS Golden Gate beta is available to install for developers today, while the official public beta will roll out in July. We don't typically recommend using the developer beta on your main computer, as they are prone to serious bugs and won't necessarily function well with all your software and accessories.

Siri on Mac never made a lot of sense, and I can't imagine it has ever been used much. But this new version of the chatbot, known as Siri AI, looks a bit more tailored for this new version of macOS Golden Gate. It carries over a lot of the new features that the iOS and iPadOS versions have, including a dedicated app, screen awareness, automatic proofreading, personal context, and the improved, customizable voice experience. Most importantly, the new Apple Foundation Models that Siri runs on is based on Google Gemini, giving it highly improved natural language processing as well as the latest computer vision and image-generation models.

But in macOS Golden Gate, Siri is now fully systemwide. It can be pulled up from anywhere on the desktop, where it’s accessible from a simple right click in the context window. One example of how this might work is with documents. In Finder, you can select a few files and then right click, then click on Siri AI to start prompting right in the Siri AI app. It's also being built into Spotlight. Right now, Spotlight is primarily just for finding things on your computer. But now Apple says that if you ask it a question that's more suited for Siri, it'll automatically answer using Siri AI and open a chat window s